Here is my food blog income report for month number 23. I have been sharing monthly traffic and income reports since launching my blog in November 2018.
If you would like to read earlier updates, you can visit the income and traffic reports section.
This report also happens to mark the 100th post on my blog. Some bloggers believe that publishing 100 posts is a turning point for Google visibility. I am not convinced there is a magic number, but I will happily accept any extra Google love if it comes my way.
September was a difficult month, so I will keep this food blog income report as focused and useful as possible. My traffic and income continued to fall, and this time I finally discovered the reason. I will explain the issue in the traffic section because it is an important lesson for anyone running a blog or content website.
I was also unwell for about two weeks and spent time in and out of the hospital, which made it harder to work consistently. Between the health issues and the website problems, September is a month I am happy to put behind me.
Still, there is value in reviewing what happened. Below you will find the monthly numbers, including blog posts published, traffic, email subscribers, push notifications, social media growth, income, and goals for the next month.
- Posts
- Traffic
- Email Subscribers
- Push Notifications
- Income
- Review and Goals
Posts
Posts this month: 5
Considering everything that happened, publishing five posts was not terrible. My ideal goal is to publish at least two posts per week, but I am not there yet.
The children went back to school halfway through September, which gave us a few more hours to work from home. However, their school day was only from 9:00 to 1:00, so the extra time was limited. From October, they will be in school until 2:00. I am glad they do not have the long school days they had last year, when both of us were working full-time and they had to be there from 8:00 to 6:00.
I do need to spend more focused time on the blog, so I will have to find a better way to keep them entertained for a few hours after they come home. If you have any good suggestions, I would love to hear them.
Traffic
September 2020: 60,922 page views, compared to 70,453 in August and 14,798 in September 2019.
This was a disappointing month for blog traffic. The decline I noticed in August, which I had blamed on the usual summer slump, turned into a much sharper drop in September. I knew I had to investigate properly because traffic continued falling no matter what I did.
At first, I could not see any major ranking changes in the search engine results pages for my recipes. The rank tracking I had set up in Keysearch did not show obvious movement. Google Search Console showed that fewer people were clicking through, and both impressions and rankings were starting to decline, but the reason was not immediately clear.
I needed more detailed information, so I signed up for a seven-day Ahrefs trial. I have used Ahrefs before in a previous job, so I audited the site, checked rankings again, reviewed backlinks, and looked for technical issues.
Update: Ahrefs released webmaster tools in late September, offering some useful Ahrefs features for free. You can create a dashboard, review website performance, check backlinks, see ranking keywords, and audit your site.
I recommend trying it if you manage a website. In the audit section, there is also a helpful feature called link opportunities, which can show places where you may be able to add internal links.
For a while, I still could not find the cause. It looked as though my posts were appearing in search results, but something had changed that made fewer people click through. I pulled the posts that had lost the most traffic from Google Analytics and searched for their main ranking keywords in incognito mode.
The problem became obvious almost immediately. My images were not appearing in Google search results. I had lost carousel positions, and my images were not showing properly in image search results, apart from Pinterest pins.
It took some time to understand why this was happening. Other bloggers suggested Google might be testing images in search results, but that did not make sense because my images were consistently missing while other results displayed photos normally.
Eventually, I tested my pages with the Rich Results Tool, a free Google tool that shows how rich results may appear in search. That is when I discovered that my images were being blocked from display because of my robots.txt file.
At the beginning of August, I had paid for site speed and index optimization. Afterward, I had several issues. Some were minor, but one was serious: the folder containing my images had been blocked from being crawled by Google.
As more pages were recrawled and Google found the images blocked, the problem became worse. Once I edited my robots.txt file, Google traffic started to improve almost immediately. By the end of September, the site had nearly recovered.
I expect October to show a fuller recovery and, hopefully, renewed traffic growth. The main lesson from this experience is simple: always audit your website after any major technical work. Even if you hire an experienced company, you should still check search results, images, structured data, sharing tools, comments, and general site behavior afterward.
The traffic source breakdown for September 2020 does not fully show how severe the issue was. The graph below, showing Google organic traffic from the beginning of August to the end of September, makes the decline much clearer.
At the start of August, the site was reaching around 1,169 sessions per day from Google alone. At the lowest point in September, that dropped to 356 sessions before I found and corrected the issue.
I also realized that the problem likely affected my Google Discover traffic. I usually have at least a few posts in Discover, and it is probably not a coincidence that visibility dropped when Google could not access the photos it needed to display.
One of my recipes, vegetarian feijoada, had been performing very well in Discover, but that traffic ended abruptly. Looking back, there were several signs I missed.
I am trying not to dwell on it, but the reason I invested in site improvements was to prepare the blog for the valuable fourth quarter. Instead, the traffic loss reduced the benefit of that investment.
Email Subscribers
327 subscribers compared to 318 in August.
Email growth was very slow this month. It is not my biggest concern right now, but I know I need to test an email subscription pop-up again. I have been hesitant to make another change so soon after the speed work because I want to avoid introducing more variables while traffic is recovering.
For now, I am postponing this until at least November.
Push Notifications
1,700 subscribers compared to 1,600 in August.
Push notification subscribers increased slightly. I would still like to test turning off OneSignal at some point, but after the site speed work I already paid for, I feel that should not be necessary. I also need to learn how to track traffic from push notifications properly, likely by setting it up as an event in Google Analytics.
Followers of The Fiery Vegetarian’s Facebook page increased from 4,481 in August to 4,663 in September. The growth was steady, but I still need to become more consistent with posting.
I should schedule Facebook posts for my page and plan ahead. However, I usually see better results from sharing in Facebook groups, and those posts cannot be scheduled in the same way. I have tried using Later before, but it was not my favorite option. If you know of a good free or affordable social media scheduler for Facebook, I would appreciate a recommendation.
2,300 followers compared to 2,200 in August.
Pinterest followers continued to grow slowly. Pinterest views stayed very steady, and I am not sure whether to feel grateful or frustrated about that.
On one hand, Pinterest has been unpredictable this year. Pin statistics can be unreliable, newer pins often do not perform as well, and I spent a lot of time in September creating new pins because that is what Pinterest encourages creators to do. I had hoped for more of a traffic increase.
On the other hand, many bloggers have reported major drops in Pinterest traffic and even account bans, so I am grateful that my account remained stable.
531 followers, up from 508 in July.
If you have read my previous reports, you already know Instagram is not my favorite platform. However, one of my blogging friends impressed me this month with her effort to reach 10,000 followers so she could add links to stories and potentially drive traffic from Instagram.
If Instagram is your platform of choice, The Baking Fairy is doing an excellent job. Her progress may even have sparked a small amount of Instagram interest in me.
Income
September income: $1,049.21 compared to $1,039.19 in August.
Income was not strong, but that was expected because of the traffic problems. RPMs, meaning revenue per thousand page views or sessions, improved to $21.15 per session and $17.51 per page view. In August, RPMs were $17.82 per session and $14.73 per page view.
Unfortunately, the higher RPM was not enough to offset the major traffic decline. The site simply had fewer visitors during the worst part of the month.
All income mentioned is gross income. It does not account for taxes, social security, accounting fees, expenses, or other deductions.
Review and Goals
I am relieved that September is over. Beyond the actual drop in traffic and income, I lost a huge amount of time trying to identify the problem, understand why it was happening, contact the optimization company, and follow up on issues that appeared after the site work.
It was frustrating and demoralizing. In the future, for site speed work, I would rather wait for someone highly recommended than rush into a decision. I have several friends who have had good experiences with Grayson at iMark Interactive, and he is often recommended by food bloggers.
The biggest lesson is that even if you trust the person or company working on your website, you still need to verify everything afterward. Check the site in incognito mode, review search results, test rich results, try pinning from your site, share posts, leave comments, and confirm that images and key pages are crawlable.
My goals for September were:
- Monitor traffic and investigate if the decline continued
- Reshoot older recipes that perform well in the fourth quarter
- Work on batching my photography
I did investigate the traffic decline, and thankfully I found the cause. If your blog traffic is falling, do not simply blame seasonal changes, summer slump, current events, or anything else without checking the data. Investigate properly.
I did not reshoot any older recipes, which was disappointing. Instead, I realized I had not prepared enough fall, Thanksgiving, or Halloween-friendly content, so I made several pumpkin recipes. I published vegan pumpkin bread, spicy pumpkin pickle, vegetarian no-boil pumpkin pasta bake, and easy vegan pumpkin pasta. After all that, I am definitely tired of pumpkin.
In October, I need to reshoot some seasonal recipes while also publishing new content that I have already planned and tested. I will aim for a balanced approach.
I did make progress with batching photography. I am trying to develop a full-time blogging routine, and I also feel that my food photography improved this month. I learned that planning to photograph six recipes in one day may sound productive, but after three recipes, it is perfectly reasonable to stop, rest, and continue another time.
Blogging is rewarding, but there is no benefit in burning yourself out. When I get tired of one task, I am learning to move on to something else that still needs doing.
I also realized that I need to schedule more time for photography. One day a week is not enough if I want better results. My photos are much stronger when I have time to think through composition, color, styling, and the shots I need.
Going forward, I plan to do recipe testing and process shots before the main shoot whenever possible. Preparing everything the day before makes photography easier because the food is not melting, steaming, or losing its best appearance while I rush.
I also found some excellent income reports from Midwest Foodie, who is doing very well financially and has beautiful photography. Her blog is a little over a year older than mine, and her reports are encouraging because they show what may be possible with more time and consistency. You can read her income reports if you enjoy this kind of behind-the-scenes blogging content.
My tentative goals for next month are:
- Reshoot time-sensitive recipes, including my vegan barmbrack, vegan stuffing, and vegan Christmas cake
- Publish one or two more pumpkin-related recipes
- Keep working on Pinterest and create plenty of new pins
- Try one new strategy, possibly affiliate marketing
I hope this September 2020 food blog income report was useful, even though it was not the most positive update. It was hard to share the traffic and income numbers this month, but setbacks are part of building a blog. Three steps forward and two steps back is still progress.
If you have any questions or would like to see additional information in future reports, let me know in the comments.
Stay positive and keep blogging.